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At this point it bears little surface-level resemblance to its Skyrim source material, and Pearce says he's been busy 'levelling up every possible thing that can be levelled up.' He's also enlisted the help of a former From Software environment artist to help polish up the game's visuals, and he's been re-writing the script with the help of Where the Water Tastes Like Wine editor Laura Michet.ДЄdmittedly, I'm not one of the two and a half million people who played the original mod, so I can't speak to much how it's changed or evolved since its initial release. The Forgotten City is a complete re-imagining of Pearce's original mod, built from the ground up in Unreal Engine with a brand-new setting, an all-new cast of characters, and a branching narrative. I may live to regret it, but why not? I don't know what's going to happen, but I love game development, and I really hope enough people like it so I can keep doing it.' 'Giving away a legal career and taking a long break from it is an incredibly risky thing to do, but I did it because it's what I love, and over time I've just slowly adapted to it.

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'Having the mod under my belt has slightly reduced the crushing existential dread of being a game developer, but it certainly hasn't removed it,' says Pearce, adding that making The Forgotten City a full game is the riskiest thing he's done to date. A way to see whether his entirely self-taught development skills are up to snuff enough so he can carry on making games once The Forgotten City comes out later this year and he no longer has millions of potential Skyrim fans to draw on.

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But I also get the sense that Pearce is turning this unusual trial by fire to his own advantage, using it as his own kind of personal training ground. Mostly because, as a former lawyer himself, he's probably all too aware of having Bethesda's legal team knocking on his door if he slips up. To his credit, Pearce is extremely diligent about not mentioning either Skyrim or Bethesda during the whole of our chat. So we rely on word of mouth and the press that the game exists and that if people enjoyed the mod then they'd probably really enjoy this as well.' Obviously, we would like everyone who played the mod to play this as well, but it can be difficult to reach them because we're not allowed to go to the mod page and say it's now a standalone game. So they certainly don't endorse it, but they won't object as long as I don't refer to them or their intellectual property - and that's fine.

'To put it as accurately as possible, we have a limited consent agreement, and they have agreed to not object to me making the mod. 'We have a pretty courteous relationship,' Pearce tells me at PAX East. Not in a properly evil, Voldemort kind of way, thankfully, but having to cut ties with the game that helped Pearce make his name (not to mention win him an Australian Writers Guild Award) has still made its journey to release a bit of a tricky one.

Ever since Pearce announced he was re-imagining his popular time-looping murder mystery mod into a proper game last year, Bethesda has become the publisher that shall not be named. Throughout my chat with Modern Storyteller's managing director Nick Pearce about his upcoming game The Forgotten City, there are two things conspicuously absent from our conversation: 'Bethesda', and ' Skyrim'.

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